The history of technology is a history of revolutions. We are in one now, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution.
But what kind of revolution is it? (Thanks to Perplexity for the illustrations.)
The most recent revolution, beginning with Steve Jobs’ “just one thing,” the revolution of clouds and devices, has been nearly invisible to the ordinary person. You don’t need a magazine to use an iPhone. You just download an app from the cloud. All the functions of that cloud are accessed by the “phone” (read Internet access device), and we don’t think twice about it.
The previous revolution, that of the public Internet itself, was similar. It took just a few years for people to stop writing http:// and a few more before they stopped even saying www. For the most part, using the public Web is intuitive, and that’s how it should be.
Hard Revolutions
The two revolutions that came before the Internet were harder to accept and adapt to.
I’m one of just a handful of working journalists left who were active during the PC revolution. In fact, I missed its earliest stages, the Apple II and CP/M. I was covering the oil boom in Houston, and didn’t get a tech assignment until early 1982.
Time Magazine made the PC the “Man of the Year” in 1982. IBM defined the age, because Apple kept its prices high and maintained strict control over its ecosystem.
But PCs weren’t easy. I looked foolish, lugging my 26 pound Kaypro into the Atlanta Business Chronicle office, and out every day, along with my modem and printer. I was quickly exiled to the freelance life I have maintained ever since. To be a “tech journalist” in the 1980s meant writing a lot of how-tos, along with explanations of what was going on behind the screens.
Before that, of course, came the computer revolution itself, the mainframes and minicomputers that defined the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. These were only used by trained professionals. My late mother was a real estate agent in the late 1960s, at an office called Dial Realty on Long Island. “Dial your home by computer!” their ads read. Which meant that every month she got a printout of new listings, cards she would place into a three-ring binder for customers to look through.
Computers themselves were hidden, behind the scenes, secret, available only to the chosen. My first investment, at age 13, was in a company called Datamation Services, an early timesharing service. Even in 1976, when I took my first programming class at Rice, we passed punch cards over an open window.
Whither AI?
It’s clear that Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel see the AI revolution as much like that earliest one. They see themselves bestriding the Earth like Gods, only they and their chosen acolytes allowed inside, delivering the word of truth, as they define it, to the global proletariat. That’s what they sold in the last election. That’s what America bought.
But it’s clear, just a month into their term of office, that AI won’t be like that. DeepSeek doesn’t just let us answer more queries. It lets more people into the AI temple. DeepSeek breaks down Musk’s doors. It lets open source be heard, and it allows mass participation in both defining and explaining what AI eventually does.
There will be Big AI, and the Great Game. But there will also be Small AI, built for every separate vertical market and geography. More important, there will be personal AI, built by hand, on Nvidia desktops, by people without computer degrees.
The real AI revolution will not be televised. It will only begin in mid-year, when the $3,000 Nvidia device Jensen Huang calls “Project Digits” ships. While the last two years have recapitulated the first computer revolution, the next years will recapitulate the PC revolution.
And when the applications are in place, the second Internet revolution will commence.
